


Angel

by Prince_Pondincherry



Category: Heretical Edge - Cerulean
Genre: Fridge Horror, Gen, Psychological Horror, Spoilers for 27-03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 01:05:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16052276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prince_Pondincherry/pseuds/Prince_Pondincherry
Summary: I had this horrifying thought and then realized, “Hey, that’s exactly the sort of thing Wildbow would have written if this was his story.” Hence the one-word title.Divergence point: Tabbris is delusional. Accessing all those years of Felicity’s memories made her feel more in common with Felicity than with Tabbris, the Seosten child who possessed her, and so she tried to convince herself that her memories from before she possessed Felicity were a product of her imagination. Convincing Felicity that she was actually Tabbris was of course much easier with generous helpings of memory erasure and false memories. Eventually, “Flick”/Tabbris was forced to face the truth.Nicholas’s, Columbus’s, and a small amount of Flick’s dialogue is taken directly from Against the Odds 9-09.





	Angel

Flick Chambers was a strange girl. For the past seven years, there had been a voice in her head. They hadn’t gotten along very well at first, but after years of a rocky relationship, they had come to an understanding, and were now friendly with each other. The voice would even help Flick on her homework, give her ideas for her investigations, and tell her things to write in the school newspaper when she had writer’s block.  
  
Flick knew that having a voice in your head wasn’t normal, so she never told anybody about it. She knew they would send her to the psychologist, who would say she was crazy, but she knew for a fact that the voice in her head was real. When Virginia Dare ( _She’s the real Virginia Dare? That’s crazy!_ ) brought her into the secret world of magic and monsters concealed alongside their own, she and the voice discussed telling somebody, but Flick eventually decided to wait and see if there was anything similar in this world before revealing her secret. Besides, she needed to figure out who she could trust first. It didn’t take long for her to realize there was something fishy going on at Crossroads Academy.  
  
In her first hunt, Flick and the voice in her head were both confused when another voice joined them in her head, but they were in the middle of combat, so they had no time for anything but surviving the fight. The other voice was surprisingly helpful, but when they tried replying to it, it either couldn’t hear them or decided not to acknowledge them. Still, this turned out to be a great opportunity. Flick’s teammate Sands had also heard the second voice, so when Flick suggested researching more about mysterious voices in your head, the whole team was willing to step in and help.  
  
Eventually, news of their research and the voice they heard on their hunt reached their classmate Doug Frey, who came to them with his own story. He explained how he had grown up on a colony world and accidentally released a group of Strangers called the Whispers while exploring with his great-great-grandfather Sulan. He went on to describe how the Whispers would pretend to be a person’s own thoughts while gradually infecting the person, eventually taking them over completely. That was when Flick realized that, despite the uncanny similarity of some of that description, the voice in her head must be something different from the Whispers. That was confirmed when Doug explained that there were symbols etched inside the New York Rangers cap he always wore that let him see the Whispers and shut out their whispering, and he didn’t see any around Flick. When Flick pretended to be worried by the voice she’d heard on the hunt, Doug even allowed her to wear the hat for a few seconds, but when she did, she could still hear the voice in her head. This was, of course, no surprise to the voice, who had insisted that she absolutely was NOT a Whisper, but, well…there are some things you want independent confirmation of, and the nature of the voice in your head is one of them.  
  
They came no closer to a breakthrough until one day, Flick was whisked away to the planet of the Meregan people. At the end of her adventure, when Flick and her teammates and friends learned the whole conflict was because of a misunderstanding, the guard escorting them to their leader, Nicholas Petan, mentioned “Seostenic capture and entrapment.” This was not something that Flick or the voice in her head had heard of, so while they were curious, they didn’t start to connect it to their situation until Nicholas Petan explained what the Seosten were.  
  
“Suffice to say, there is a… group. We call them Seosten, but they have many other names that you would recognize more quickly if they were used. This group has the ability to… among other things, capture and possess the bodies of Alters, taking them over entirely. Their identities, wants, desires, all are suppressed in favor of the Seosten who is controlling them.”  
  
_Huh, that sounds familiar._  
  
_No, you can’t be a Seosten. I know you occasionally took control of me at first, but you haven’t controlled me at all for years!_  
  
_He said they have the **ability**  to capture and possess the bodies of Alters, not that they  **have**  to control them at all times. I just stopped trying to control you when I got older._  
  
“You mean they’re possessed, like demons or whatever,” Flick’s teammate Columbus said.  
  
Nicholas nodded and replied, “The idea of such possession stems from the capabilities of these Seosten. Once they have taken someone, it is impossible to tell them apart from the real person. They gain access to all of their victims’ thoughts and memories. But the true individual is trapped, incapable of expressing themselves in any way. The Seosten has complete control of them.”  
  
_I don’t know, that really sounds like what I used to do back when I would take control occasionally. I had all of your memories—still do, in fact—but I could move, and you couldn’t._  
  
_Okay, yes, I admit it, you’re a Seosten, sent to possess me to keep me safe from other Seosten. That’s been your story all along, and now we finally have a name for it._  
  
_Why so defensive? I’m not trying to control you any longer._  
  
_I said we were done with this topic, Tabbris._  
  
While Flick was debating with the voice in her head, her teammates and Nicholas had continued talking. Flick started paying attention just in time to hear Nicholas say, “My goal was never to destroy what remains of the Meregan race.”  
  
“No,” Flick shot back. “You just sent your thugs to attack them for fun. I can’t believe I looked up to you when I–” She closed her mouth, shook her head angrily, and determinedly put the mental conversation out of her mind, and, more effectively, out of Tabbris’s mind.  
  


-

  
As the year went on, she discovered evidence that the Seosten’s plots were much closer to her than she had ever realized. The Seosten were trying to kill her roommate. A Seosten was possessing one of her friends, and had even found herself unable to possess Flick. Of course, this was more evidence in favor of Tabbris’s assertion that she too was a Seosten, but she was only there to keep Flick safe from other Seosten. After all, that was what had happened so far. Still, Flick never told anybody else about Tabbris, even the people she knew wasn’t possessed. It could have been worry for whether they would accept her, but it was definitely because…well, whatever the reason, she just really didn’t want to think about revealing it.  
  
The situation came to a head when Flick and her girlfriends were learning how to cast an anti-possession rune that would force a Seosten out of its host. This would definitely be useful against the hostile Seosten, so Flick carefully avoided thinking about what might happen if they decided to practice on each other. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they did, so Flick made the excuse that she needed to use the restroom first and walked away, internally panicking.  
  
_Calm down! It’ll be okay! I’ll just unpossess you for a little bit while you go finish your spell practice. I’m sure I can do it, even though I haven’t stopped possessing you at any point since I was like two years old. It’s instinctive, right?_  
  
Flick didn’t respond until she was safely out of anybody’s sight in the bathroom.  _Okay, do it now. Please work. Please work. Please work. You can do it._  
  
_Alright, so I just….shit. Why isn’t it working? Am I doing it wrong? Why can’t I figure out how to leave you? I haven’t even been directly controlling you for years, how do I get out?_  
  
By this point, tears were streaming down Flick’s face.  _I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry._  
  
_Hey, no, why are **you**  apologizing? I’m the one who possessed you! I’m the one who’s defective!_  
  
Flick let out a sob.  _No. No you’re not._  For the first time in years, Flick allowed herself to remember. Remember everything, and admit to herself what it meant. Remember back to years ago, when the voice in her head had controlled their shared body—and the two years of her life before that.  _I’m sorry, Felicity_.  
  
_What? I’m Tabbris, you’re Felicity._  
  
_No. Your name is Felicity. I’ve been calling myself Flick for years…but Tabbris is **my**  name_.  
  
Felicity collapsed to the floor, partly from shock and partly because she hadn’t controlled her own limbs in years. She looked up to see an adorable little blond girl, tears streaming down her face. “I’m sorry, Felicity.”

**Author's Note:**

> I had this horrifying thought and then realized, “Hey, that’s exactly the sort of thing Wildbow would have written if this was his story.” Hence the one-word title.
> 
> Divergence point: Tabbris is delusional. Accessing all those years of Felicity’s memories made her feel more in common with Felicity than with Tabbris, the Seosten child who possessed her, and so she tried to convince herself that her memories from before she possessed Felicity were a product of her imagination. Convincing Felicity that she was actually Tabbris was of course much easier with generous helpings of memory erasure and false memories. Eventually, “Flick”/Tabbris was forced to face the truth.
> 
> Nicholas’s, Columbus’s, and a small amount of Flick’s dialogue is taken directly from Against the Odds 9-09.


End file.
